The Gulf War 1991 – Part 2: The Storm

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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network; and as always, I’m your host, Zach Cornwell.

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Now, let’s get down to business.

You are listening to Part Two of a three-part series on the 1991 Gulf War.

Needless to say, if you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, I’d definitely recommend you check that out before diving into this one. Last episode was relatively short, but we covered a lot of ground; We hopped & skipped around the 20^th century, setting up several plot threads that are going to start intertwining and playing off each other in interesting ways. If this episode is the “what”, last episode was the “why”.

But if you have already listened to Part 1: Lines in the Sand, you are right where you need to be. Before we head into the next stage of the story, though, I think it might be good to briefly retrace our steps, and remind ourselves what happened last time.

Last episode began – and ended - with helicopters.

We opened on American choppers evacuating Saigon, and we closed with Iraqi helicopters descending into Kuwait. The two scenes were only separated by about 15 years, but in that short time the world had changed several times over. And nowhere was that change more turbulent than in the nation of Iraq, thrust under the hot lights of the world stage by its fearsome dictator, Saddam Hussein.

In Part 1, we spent a lot of time getting to know Saddam. We learned about his rough childhood, replete with bullies, beatings and bare floors. We watched him transform from a streetwise survivor to a ruthless political operator, shimmying up the greased pole that was Iraqi politics and eventually arriving at the summit. But no Saddam origin story would be complete without a retelling of the big, bloody set piece that history remembers as the Ba’ath Party Purge of 1979.

Saddam had plenty of skeletons in his closet; he also had skeletons in the attic, the basement, and in the shed out back, but the sheer theatricality of the 1979 Ba’ath Party Purge would’ve made Stalin’s ghost swoon. In July of ‘79, Saddam gathered all of his political rivals into a conference hall, along with a hapless herd of sycophants. Then, chomping on a cigar and chewing scenery in equal measure, he accused 60 or so people of plotting against him and had them dragged out of the room. If his unlucky enemies were expecting any light at the end of the tunnel, all they saw was a muzzle flash. 21 of them were denounced as traitors and executed. In the coming weeks, hundreds more followed them into the dirt.

And from that moment on, Saddam Hussein was the undisputed leader of Iraq.

But the sweet tingle of absolute power would not last long. Saddam’s grand plans for Iraqi dominance in Middle East were derailed by an unexpected revolution in neighboring Iran. And rather than sit on his hands while the Ayatollah literally called for his head, Saddam chose to go to war. By the winter of 1980, Iraqi and Iranian soldiers were dying by the tens of thousands in a pointless, protracted bloodbath. Eight years later, when the mustard gas cleared and the gun barrels cooled, Iraq’s economy was trashed and Saddam owed billions of dollars to creditors - most notably the wealthy oil states of Kuwait, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.

To finance his war with Iran, Saddam had borrowed heavily from the Gucci sheiks in the Persian Gulf; and when the bill came due, he begged them to forgive the debt; but, they flatly refused.

In the throes of insolvency, Saddam Hussein became scared, angry and desperate. He had no cash, no recourse and no way out. But he did have one thing: the fourth largest army in the world. In practical terms, Iraq had become the geopolitical equivalent of a starving man with a loaded gun. To borrow an analogy from historian Bernard Trainor, if the bank would not forgive the loans, Saddam was going to rob the bank.

In Saddam’s mind, invading Kuwait seemed like a pretty good plan. He needed money, Kuwait had a lots of it. He had a million-man army; Kuwait had a handful of glorified mall cops. It was simple math. Two-plus-two equals ka-ching. But there was one factor that Hussein grossly underestimated, or at least misinterpreted:

The American interest in the Persian Gulf.

In the United States, administrations came and went, Democrat one cycle, Republican the next. But oil was the ultimate bi-partisan issue. A foreign policy priority as American as apple pie and twice as sticky. Ever since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt shook hands with the King of Saudi Arabia on Valentine’s Day 1945, America had been carefully watching the Middle Eastern oil fields, manipulating what it could and mitigating what it could not. As President Ronald Reagan bluntly put it in October of 1981:

“There’s no way that we could stand by and see that [the Gulf] taken over by anyone that would shut off that oil.”

So when Saddam turned his eyes toward the Kuwaiti border in the summer of 1990, he knew he would need some kind of green light from the United States, however subtle. Some kind of wink, some kind of nudge, that an invasion would not be met with any serious consequences. The Saudis were untouchable, of course, but maybe the Kuwaitis were expendable in American eyes. U.S. foreign policy was nothing if not ethically flexible, and maybe the Americans, those “conspiring bastards” as Saddam put it, would let this one slide. After all, if he was gonna take a dip in the deep end, he wanted a clear nod from the lifeguard first. 

From where he was sitting, Saddam had every reason to be optimistic. The United States had been an unofficial patron of Iraq for years. During the war with Iran, they’d supported him, armed him, bankrolled him - even while holding their noses. And with the global landscape fundamentally shifting at the ending of the Cold War, now seemed like the perfect time for Iraq to make a play for Kuwait. As one historian recounted:

“The present circumstances in the world today have given us the opportunity of a lifetime” to redraw the region’s map, one of Saddam’s advisers counseled. The Soviets were down, the Americans not yet fully ready to take their place, and for the time being, the world seemed remarkably unrestrained. In his words, “This opportunity will not happen again for fifty years.”

So when Saddam sat down on July 25^th, 1990 with April Glaspie, the US Ambassador to Iraq, he did so with the hopes of receiving an under-the-table fist bump to settle his grievances with Kuwait - without interference from the US.

But Saddam had severely miscalculated.

Ambassador Glaspie later claimed that during their 2-hour conversation, she drew a “line in the sand” for Saddam, that she clearly articulated the fact that America would not abide any kind of threat to its interests in the region. That is not what Saddam heard. Or at least not what he chose to hear. In retrospect, Glaspie’s comment that the US had “no opinion” on Arab-Arab conflicts was exactly the kind of frothy, noncommittal rhetoric that left a crack in the door. A crack that Saddam believed he could fit an entire army through. Both Glaspie and Hussein may have been conversing in Arabic, but they were speaking entirely different political languages.

Despite the flogging she later received in the press, Glaspie’s handling of the situation had been fundamentally routine, even appropriate. As another US ambassador said later in her defense: 

“That’s standard. That’s what you always say. You would not have said, ‘Mr. President, if you really are considering invading Kuwait, by God, we’ll bring down the wrath of God on your palaces, and on your country, and you’ll all be destroyed.’ She wouldn’t have said that, nor would I. Neither would any diplomat.”

Nevertheless, one historian wrote, “Those words essentially ended her career.”

Because one week later, on August 2^nd, 1990, the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait.

And that, folks, brings us right to speed. In today’s episode, we’re going to pick things up right where we left off. We’ll explore the immediate fallout of the invasion, the international response, and what it was like for the everyday people caught in the middle. We’ll also expand our cast a bit. Last episode was definitely the Saddam show, but this time we’ll be meeting some brand-new characters that are going to have a big impact on our story going forward.

I’m very excited to share this one with you, and I hope you enjoy it.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

Welcome to The Gulf War 1991 –Part 2: The Storm.

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It’s the morning of August 2^nd, 1990.

We’re about 35,000 feet in the air, in the cool, quiet cabin of a Boeing 747.

British Airways Flight 149.

The previous evening, Flight 149 had taken off from London’s Heathrow Airport, bound for its final destination of Kuala Lumpur. As the plane roared off the tarmac, the 367 passengers tightened their seatbelts, relaxed their legs, and settled in for a long flight. Cheerful stewardesses in blue pinstripe skirts glided up and down the aisles, serving cold drinks and salty snacks.

About six hours later, around 4am, some of the sleepy passengers woke up to a gentle ping from the intercom and a comforting voice from the cockpit. The captain, a man named Richard Brunyate, announced that the plane would be landing soon for a brief refueling stop. After all, you can’t make it all the way from London to Malaysia on a single tank of jet fuel.  

Captain Brunyate instructed the passengers to fasten their seatbelts, put their tray tables in the upright position, and prepare for landing. They were beginning their descent into Kuwait International Airport.

At 4:13 AM, the 747 touched down onto the runway. Now, on a normal day, the airport in Kuwait City was a bustling hive of international travel, but as the passengers of Flight 149 rubbed sleep from their eyes and looked out the portholes, they noticed something kinda creepy. 

The airport was completely empty.

Not only was Flight 149 the only plane on the tarmac, the terminal looked deserted. Most of the passengers chose to remain on the plane while it refueled, but a few disembarked to stretch their legs. Wandering through the terminal like kids in a haunted house, they stumbled upon a chilling sight. On a board listing departures and arrivals, written in dreadful red letters, was the same word repeated over and over again. “Cancelled” / “Cancelled” / “Cancelled”.

Flight 149 was the only arrival into Kuwait Airport that morning. Clearly, those other flights knew something that they did not.

Back on the plane, some passengers noticed that the Kuwaiti cleaning crews who’d come on board to tidy up the cabin were nervous, whispering in low voices. As one passenger named John Chappell Jr, just a teenager at the time, remembered: “These guys did not want to be on the plane. They weren’t doing the job properly and couldn’t do it fast enough. I thought, This is all a bit odd…”

A few seconds later, the mystery of the deserted airport was solved.

Three fighter jets screamed out of the dark, dropping bombs onto the runway and engulfing the tarmac in flame. The cabin erupted in blind panic. One passenger named Edward Hammet remembered: “The next thing I knew, some of the cabin crew were rushing down the aisle yelling ‘get off get off get off get off.’”

The plane had just been refilled with 57,000 gallons of jet fuel. If one of those bombs hit, they’d all be dead in seconds.

Out of habit, some passengers started to open the overhead compartments to get their luggage, but a flight attendant screamed over the noise: “Move, for fuck’s sake, leave your gear!” In three minutes, the entire plane had disembarked. Explosions continued to bloom in the distance, while fighter jets strafed the airport, attacking the control tower and turning the tarmac into craters of bubbling asphalt.

As they streamed into the deserted terminal, looking for guidance, answers, any kind of help, the passengers eventually encountered a group of stern-looking men in uniforms. Soldiers, with guns. For a second, there was a flash of hope that these were Kuwaiti security forces, here to rescue them. But then, they saw the patches on their arms, and the look in their eyes. These soldiers were from the Iraqi Army.

When British Airways Flight 149 had taken off from London six hours earlier, Kuwait had been at peace. But when it landed, its passengers found themselves in the middle of an active war zone.

The first hostages of the Gulf War had been taken.

Meanwhile, all across Kuwait, the Iraqi Army closed around its objectives like a fist around a windpipe. 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and 2,000 tanks, supported by fighter jets and heavy artillery, poured across the border in a lightning offensive. They captured key objectives like radio stations and communication arrays, power plants, banks, and sea ports. Kuwaiti citizens woke up to a sky filled with swirling sand, kicked up by the thousands of Iraqi vehicles crossing the desert. 

And as for the Kuwaiti Army - a token force of 16,000 troops - the few that actually fought back died quickly; and the rest threw up their hands in surrender. Kuwait’s defense collapsed before it even began.

But the Iraqi army’s real objective, the real prize - more important than any airport or infrastructure - was lounging in a lavish seaside palace on the north end of Kuwait City. The ruler of Kuwait, the Emir, was priority number one. This was the man who’d ignored Saddam’s pleas, shrugged off his threats, and violated oil production quotas while Iraq’s economy drowned in debt. If Kuwait had “stabbed Iraq in the back”, as Saddam had colorfully put it, the Emir was the one holding the knife. And now, by all accounts, he was a sitting duck.

As a red sun started to peek over the horizon, spilling dawn onto the Kuwaiti beaches, a swarm of helicopters converged on the Palace. Iraqi commandos landed on the roof and stormed into the gardens, looking to capture or kill the Emir. After a chaotic gun battle that lasted all morning, the Palace finally fell. But when the smoke cleared and their ears stopped ringing, the Iraqi commandos realized that their prize was nowhere to be found. The Emir was gone. In fact, the entire royal family had vanished into thin air.

Just hours before the invasion, the Emir had received a warning call from the Americans, most likely the CIA.

Satellite images showed the Iraqi army moving swiftly across the border, they explained, and unless he wanted to gamble his life on the forgiveness of Saddam Hussein, the Emir needed to get out now. Without issuing orders to the Kuwaiti military or a single word of guidance to the government, the Emir and his family piled into a convoy of Mercedes-Benz limousines and raced south across the desert, into the safe harbor of Saudi Arabia.   

In his command center back in Baghdad, Saddam received word that the Emir had escaped. It was a loose end he had hoped to avoid, but as reports flooded back from the battlefield, he started to feel better and better and better. The loss of the Emir was just one sour note in a very sweet day. In less than 12 hours, the Iraqi Army had completely taken control of Kuwait. It was, as one historian put it “a complete walkover”.

All of the oil, all of the investments, all of the wealth – now belonged to Saddam. “Never in history”, journalist Christopher Dickey wrote, “has so much been lost so quickly by so few.”

The Iraqi dictator could not help but gloat. This was nothing like the catastrophic 8-year conflict with Iran. The invasion of Kuwait had gone off without a hitch. It was short, it was sweet, it was over. Saddam now had all the money he could ever need. With access to Kuwait’s very liquid assets, he controlled one fifth of the world’s oil supply. As historian Jim Corrigan writes: “An annexed Kuwait would yield $20 million a day in additional oil revenues, solving his economic troubles.” Finally, after months of uncertainty and fear and frustration, things had turned a corner. Saddam’s cigars tasted just a little bit better that evening.

There was something, however, that itched in the back of his brain. Something a Kuwaiti diplomat had said a few days earlier in response to Saddam’s bellicosity. A Kuwaiti negotiator had sneered: “Don’t threaten us. Kuwait has very powerful friends. You’ll be forced to pay back all the money you owe us.”

Powerful friends? Saddam thought, Please. You mean the Americans? The British? The Saudis? What do you think I am, stupid? Do you think I’d really wipe my ass with the United Nations charter without getting a green light from the US? All it took was a two-hour conversation with that parrot Glaspie to confirm that the United States would not actually do anything. They’ll whine and stamp their feet, for the sake of appearances, but nothing will actually happen.

As one American diplomat remembered years later: “Saddam probably figured the Arab world and the world at large would bitch and moan for a couple of days and then people would get used to it and the world would essentially learn to live with it.”

Even if the American government did want to go to war in defense of the Gucci sheiks, Saddam thought, their people would never allow it. Unlike dictators, American Presidents have voters to answer to, and those voters would never abide thousands of dead boys in the desert. As Saddam had told April Glaspie to her face during their infamous exchange: “Yours is a society which cannot accept 10,000 dead in one battle.”

And so, in the short term, Hussein felt very, very confident. Kuwait and all its wealth would be absorbed into Iraq. The House of Saddam would endure for a century and beyond. Once again, Saddam the streetwise survivor had prevailed.

But across the Atlantic, his alternate reality was already beginning to unravel.

AUDIO: [We view this situation with gravity….what Iraq has done violates every norm of international law…and I’ve been meeting with top security experts….I’ll have another such meeting at Camp David….

As President George H.W. Bush, spoke to reporters on the White House lawn, his administration was wrestling with how to respond to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. They didn’t know what they were going to do, but they knew they had to something.

The last time George Herbert Walker Bush made an appearance in our story, he was placing his hand on a bible and being sworn in as President of the United States in January of 1989, eighteen months before the crisis in Kuwait. The road to that oath had been long, difficult, and ugly.

There are some leaders who just ooze charisma. People who can walk into a room and project a kind of Churchillian confidence, who instantly command respect, fear, and admiration. George H.W. Bush… was not one of those leaders. A self-described “quiet” man, who could often be, in his own words, “awkward” and “not eloquent”, George Bush was not the most obvious candidate for Commander-in-Chief.

But what he lacked in personality, he made up for in pedigree. Of all the 46 men who have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution as President of the United States, few of them could boast a resume as lengthy or impressive as George H.W. Bush.

Born into well-connected clan of East Coast blue bloods, Bush seemed destined for a life of prosperity and power. His WASP-y childhood was a luxurious Argyle weave of summers in Maine, posh prep schools, and Connecticut cocktail parties. But as privileged as he was, young George had genuine sense of civic responsibility, and when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the 18-year-old rich kid marched down to the recruiting office and joined up with the Navy. Four years later, Bush came home from the war with several service medals and a head full of nightmares.

Like all American men of his generation, World War 2 left a deep imprint on George Bush’s psyche. This was a war that was both filmed and understood in black-and-white; A conflict defined by moral imperatives and clear-cut stakes. In 1939, a rogue dictator in Europe had ignited a conflict that ultimately claimed the lives of 70 million people; and it had all started with the annexation of a tiny patch of territory. Bush, and many others like him, internalized that lesson. And he believed that it was America’s responsibility to make sure that never, ever happened again.

But even with 3% of the global population dead after World War 2, the world continued to turn. And after the War, George put his medals in a box and continued polishing his rapidly-expanding resume. While a 10-year-old Saddam Hussein was getting the shit kicked out of him by bullies in backwater Iraq, George Bush was being sworn into the ultra-exclusive Skull & Bones Society at Yale University.

And even though their lives were separated by 7,000 miles and a gulf of generational wealth, both Saddam Hussein and George Bush’s fortunes were intertwined with the oil industry. After he graduated from Yale, Bush traded his boat shoes for cowboy boots and moved down to Texas to become an oil man. Armed with his Daddy’s connections and several generous lines of credit, Bush quickly found success. His oil ventures prospered, his rolodex expanded, and he was a rich man in his own right within a few years. After that, Bush did what a lot of bored rich guys do: He turned his attention to politics.

George’s blood may have been blue, but his ideology was deep red. After joining the Republican Party, he embarked on a political career that could only be described as hit-or-miss. Bush seemed to lose more elections than he won, but no matter how many times the voting public said “no thanks”, Bush remained buoyant within the Republican Party. Throughout the 1970s, he served as Ambassador to the United Nations, Chairman of the RNC, Chief of the Liaison Office to China, and Director of the CIA. In effect, he was the ultimate insider. A man for whom political power was as much of a birthright as an aspiration.

And in 1979, in yet another coincidental parallel, Saddam Hussein and George H.W. Bush both decided that they wanted to not just serve, but lead, their respective nations. Saddam, as we know, accomplished this through a bloody, theatrical purge. George Bush, meanwhile, opened up his little black book and decided to call in some favors.

He was going to run for President.

In 1980, at the age of 56, George Bush made a play for the Republican nomination, but was soundly defeated by the charming grin and wavy hair of actor-turned-politico Ronald Reagan. And for a brief moment, Bush’s White House dreams appeared to be dashed. But ‘ol Ronny knew a loyal lieutenant when he saw one, and rather than discard Bush like a worn-out cowboy hat, Reagan tapped him to be his Vice President. Within a year, George was walking through the gates of the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; albeit not in the way he’d envisioned or expected.

Over the next 8 years, George Bush served the Reagan administration well. Maybe a bit too well, in fact. Bush was so loyal, so in lockstep with his boss, that he developed a reputation as a bit of an empty suit, a doormat, a “yes man” who lacked any convictions or vision of his own. In one famous political comic strip, Bush was portrayed as literally invisible, not manly enough to even take physical form. That popular perception was most brutally articulated in a Newsweek cover story that dropped the very same day Bush announced he was going to run for President to succeed Ronald Reagan in the 1988 election.

In big white type, Newsweek printed one sentence, four words and 22 letters that cut George Bush to the bone. “Fighting The Wimp Factor”, it read.

Wimp. It was a four-letter word that haunted Bush well into the election season and beyond. An infuriating oversimplification, he called it a “ugly, nasty political shot”. And in the face of such withering criticism, Bush used the only shield he had: his resume.

“A wimp? My combat comrades didn’t think so; my business friends didn’t think so; the people at the CIA didn’t think so; so why should I be concerned? The American people won’t think so.”

In the end, he was right. The American voting public ultimately made peace with the wimp factor, and sent George to the White House in January of ’89.

For better or worse, Bush finally had what he’d always wanted.

Eighteen months later in August of 1990, when an advisor informed the President that the Iraqi Army had invaded Kuwait, no one knew how the so-called “wimp” would respond. Would he sit back and do nothing? Would he be the doormat the papers had always accused him of being? As it turned out, biographer Jeffrey A. Engel writes, “the ensuing six months defined Bush’s legacy”.

12 hours after Bush was first told about Kuwait, he convened his National Security Council in the West Wing of the White House. Twenty-nine people from 11 different executive departments sat around a table, talking, trying to decide how to respond to Saddam Hussein’s invasion; And to be honest, the initial reaction was mostly a collective shrug. "No modern-day White House,” Jeffrey Engel observed, “is ever truly taken aback by bad news emanating from the Middle East.”

“Does anybody really care about Kuwait?”, mused Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney shared a similar view: “The rest of the world […] has little interest in poor Kuwait.”Maybe, a Energy Department rep argued, this was a “interesting opportunity” to drive oil prices down? Did it really matter whether oil drums had an Iraqi flag or a Kuwait flag printed on the side? After all, the United States had no defense agreements with Kuwait, no treaties, no obligations to come to its aid.

Even the President seemed somewhat ambivalent. As Bush wrote in his diary later that night: “It’s halfway around the world; U.S. options are limited; and all in all, it is a highly complicated situation.”

“The administration’s initial response,” writes Jeffrey Engel, “was disjointed, unclear, and largely devoid of any high-minded principle of salvation or defense of the Kuwaiti regime.” The conversation, one official remembered, “suggested resignation to the invasion and even adoption of a fait accompli.”

There was, however, one fact that made everyone in that room very, very nervous. The Iraqi Army was waytoo close for comfort to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Satellite images showed that Saddam’s troops were 8/10s of a mile away from the Saudi border. Like a knife pricking at an oil-rich jugular.

Now, the Iraqis weren’t showing any signs of attacking or gearing up for an assault…but how long would that last? With his successful conquest of Kuwait, Saddam owned 20% of the world’s oil. What if he decided he wanted to steamroll into Saudi Arabia and make it 45%?

That open question hung like a cloud in the Cabinet room. Almost half the world’s oil in the hands of a single man. And not just any man. Saddam friggin’ Hussein. The mind reeled at the possibilities. He could pump the price up, he could pump it down, he strangle the economies of smaller nations, you name it. “It was”, historian Jon Meacham writes, “an untenable prospect for a global economy so dependent on petroleum.”

In a vacuum, the fall of Kuwait was not a huge problem for the United States, but if their longtime partner Saudi Arabia was even remotely threatened, military action was absolutely on the table. As Colin Powell observed: “We can’t make a case for losing lives in Kuwait, but Saudi Arabia is different.”

Over the course of the next 24 hours, George Bush’s conflicted reaction to the Kuwait crisis hardened very quickly, largely thanks to some less-than-gentle nudging from his National Security advisors. They urged him to reframe his thinking on this thing, to look past the old Cold War conventions. This was not just an economic challenge, they said, but an ideological one.

The Cold War is over, and we are at a unique moment in history. How we respond to this is going to reset the rules of the game. Mr. President, do we want to live in a world where borders mean nothing? Where big countries can gobble up little countries with impunity? If the United States turns a blind eye to such a flagrant violation of national sovereignty, what kind of ripples will that create? How many other Saddam Husseins will we embolden?

“We would be setting a terrible precedent,” urged one advisor, “one that would only accelerate violentcentrifugal tendencies—in this emerging ‘post–Cold War’ era . . . That also raises the issue of US reliability in a most serious way.”

A State Department rep echoed the point: “This is the first test of the postwar system. If he [Saddam] succeeds, others may try the same thing. It would be a bad lesson.”

“Under these circumstances”, another stressed, “it is absolutely essential that the US not only put a stop to this aggression but roll it back.”

The British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, also stressed this idea to Bush in a heated exchange that week. “If Iraq wins, no small state is safe. They won’t stop here. They see a chance to take a major share of oil. It’s got to be stopped. We must do everything possible.” And with a skillful flick of a verbal scalpel, designed to cut the President on his most sensitive issue, she told Bush that this was not the time to “go wobbly”.

AKA, don’t be a “wimp”, George.

Bush mulled all this over, pouring thoughts and confessions into his diary late into the night. “The enormity of Iraq is upon me now,” he reflected, “The status quo is intolerable. […] “What we’re doing is going to chart the future of the world for the next hundred years. It’s that big.”

This was no time for America, much less its President, to be seen as soft, or weak, or a wimp. Sanctions were not going to be enough. Freezing Kuwaiti assets was not going to be enough. And so, on August 5^th, just after 3 o’clock in the afternoon, Bush met with reporters again on the White House lawn and delivered an impromptu line that eventually became the most iconic words of his Presidency.

“This will not stand. This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.”

And while Bush was crafting cable news soundbites, an American delegation to Saudi Arabia was already in the air. After a grueling 16-hour-flight, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney stepped off a plane in Riyadh, the capitol of Saudi Arabia.

Accompanied by an entourage of CIA and Military reps, the delegation had one goal, and one goal alone: Convince the famously prickly Saudis to allow American troops into the kingdom as a shield against the Iraqi Army.  

If history was any guide, it would not be an easy sell. 14 centuries earlier, the Prophet Muhammed had famously told his followers: “Let there be no two religions in Arabia”, and those words still had power for the theocratic regime in Riyadh. As historian Alistair Finlan writes: “The key factor would be to persuade the very conservative Islamic kingdom to accept large numbers of Christian soldiers into a country that possessed the holiest site in the Muslim world, Mecca.”

As they sipped cardamom tea in the marble halls of a Riyadh palace, Cheney and his crew sat face-to-face with the elderly monarch of Saudi Arabia, King Fahd. That’s F-A-H-D, Fahd. The Saudi King was a notoriously indecisive ruler, but Dick Cheney was as cool a customer as they came. Known as the Sphinx among D.C. elites, Cheney had, according to historian Rick Atkinson, “developed inscrutability to an art. […] He had the best poker face in Washington”.

And Cheney used his that poker face to convince King Fahd that Saudi Arabia needed America’s help.

“If we fail to deal with Saddam Hussein now,” Cheney urged, “he will only grow stronger and more threatening. I'd like to receive your approval to proceed with introducing U.S. forces. […] 

The president asked me to assure you that we will stay as long as you want us. We will leave when you no longer need us. We will stay until justice is done but not stay a minute longer. We are not seeking bases, but you are a long way away. We need to make joint preparations now."

King Fahd agreed that Saddam was a problem. And that his plans might not end with a conquest of Kuwait "It's not just his aggression against Kuwait but {he} aspires to something larger. . . .”

Like bees around a hive, the King’s advisors murmured admonitions into his ear. Allowing Christian soldiers into the Arabian Peninsula at the scale that Cheney was talking about had never been done in the history of the Kingdom. The people would be furious. The clergy would be furious. It may even violate religious law. But the King was convinced by Cheney’s presentation.

"We have to do this," the Saudi monarch croaked, "The Kuwaitis waited, they waited too long and now there no longer is a Kuwait."

“There is still a Kuwait,” one advisor hissed.

"Yes," said the King, "and all the Kuwaitis [royal family] are living in our hotel rooms."

The King turned to Cheney and said: “Okay, we’ll do it. Two conditions. One, you will bring enough to do the job, and two, you will leave when it’s over.”

As the American delegation finished their tea, packed up their papers, and prepared to leave, Cheney turned to the King and said: "This has been a truly historic meeting,"

"No doubt it is," replied the King.

With that, the United States had been given the keys to the kingdom – literally.

Back in Washington D.C., the gravity of events began to sink in for George Bush. “I feel great pressure, but I also feel a certain calmness when we talk about these matters. I know I am doing the right thing. […] “The troops are under way,” he told his diary, “This is the biggest step of my Presidency.”

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It’s late August of 1990.

Just a few weeks after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

We’re in Riyadh, the capitol of Saudi Arabia.

In the wake of King Fahd’s deal with the Americans, the city is a very busy place. The Muslim calls to prayer are all but drowned out by the constant whine of jet engines overhead. Across the city, the tempo of war is rising. According to Said K. Aburish: “A US military plane carrying troops or war materials was landing in Saudi Arabia every ten minutes”.

But amidst all the sound and fury, one man quietly walks into the Saudi Defense Ministry, carrying a bundle of maps and diagrams. He is very tall – about 6-foot-four – with a long black beard and big brown eyes. He’s a young guy, only about 33 years old, but as he walks into the Defense Ministry, he is treated with the utmost sense of warmth and respect. To his countrymen, this young man is a war hero; a veteran of the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. A tried-and-true Mujahid (or holy warrior)

When the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, this man left his pampered life in Saudi Arabia at the age of 22 to help organize a guerrilla resistance against the Red Army. He donated his time, his money, and the young years of his life to the cause of the mujahideen.

But the Soviet-Afghan War is over. Time marches on. And for a holy warrior, there are always new battles to fight. The young Mujahid is here today in Riyadh to meet with the Saudi Defense Minister, Crown Prince Sultan. He has a proposal to make; services to offer. Once pleasantries are exchanged and introductions are made, the young man tells the Crown Prince that he wants to fight Saddam Hussein, to lead a jihad against the Iraqi Army and drive it out of Kuwait.

“I want to fight against Saddam, an infidel.”, he says, “I want to establish a guerrilla war against Iraq.”

The Crown Prince gently explains that there is no need. We have secured the partnership of the Americans. They’ve pledged a quarter million troops to protect the Kingdom. Even now, thousands are arriving every day.

That is exactly the problem, the young radical sneers. Allowing American soldiers - Christian soldiers - into the kingdom is a direct violation of our faith. Saudis should be protecting Saudi Arabia, not these Imperialist, oil-guzzling pigs. He goes on: “You listen to America – your master. […] I am the commander of an Islamic army. I am not afraid of being put in jail or being in prison. I am only afraid of Allah.”

The Crown Prince, becoming exasperated, replies that fighting in Kuwait is not the same as fighting in Afghanistan. “There are no caves in Kuwait. You cannot fight them from the mountains and caves. What will you do when he [Saddam] lobs missiles at you with chemical and biological weapons?”

“We will fight them with faith”, the Mujahid answers.

Ultimately, the Crown Prince declined the offer, and it wounded the young Mujahid deeply. As he stormed out of the Defense Ministry in a huff, rejected and angry, the young man decided that he would make the United States pay for their disgusting incursion into the Arab world. Not today, not tomorrow, but someday soon. That young man’s name was Osama bin Laden.

As historian Peter Bergen writes: “The arrival of a large U.S. army in the kingdom was a transformational event that hardened bin Laden’s anti-Americanism into a passionate hatred for the United States.”

Even the Crown Prince noticed a shift in the young bin Laden: “I saw radical changes in his personality as he changed from a calm, peaceful and gentle man interested in helping Muslims, into a person who believed that he would be able to amass and command an army to liberate Kuwait. It revealed his arrogance.”

As Bin Laden receded into the shadows to fight another day, American troops continued to flow into the Saudi kingdom, tens of thousands of men and women who suddenly found themselves very far from home. One of those soldiers was a 20-year-old Marine named Anthony Swofford. In his famous memoir of the of the Gulf War, Jarhead, Swofford describes the scene that greeted him after stepping off a plane in Riyadh:

The tarmac is full of American civilian jumbo jets—American, Delta, United; we flew United. The scene on the airfield is like that at any busy international airport, only we passengers are wearing fatigues and carrying loaded rifles, our gas masks strapped to our hips. Just beyond the tarmac, artillery batteries point their guns east and north. Fighter jets patrol the sky.”

To many US soldiers, who’d grown up in the cities and suburbs and trailer parks of North America, the stark, alien landscape of Saudi Arabia felt unnerving and unwelcoming. As a pilot named Buck Wyndham observed:

There’s simply no better way to describe this place than “hellish.” It’s sandy, dry, and windy, just as we expected it would be. The sky is a yellow-brown color I’ve never seen before, suspended with grit and fine dust.

But despite the ugly scenery, there was an undeniable weight to desert, an intangible sense of import and history. Wyndham continued:

I felt like there was a vague, ancient piety here, as if a thousand years of devout spiritual determination had seeped into every rock and grain of sand, mixed with waves of hatred for the infidels flying overhead. It momentarily gave me a very bad feeling, and I could tell it was going to be a bit of a mental challenge to overcome my own insecurities about this place. Maybe I just need to immerse myself in it, like hot bathwater, and I’ll get used to it.

For all their reservations, Anthony Swofford and Buck Wyndham were just two tiny cogs in a massive, mind-boggling ballet of military logistics that would become known as Operation Desert Shield. A quarter of a million soldiers would eventually be sent into the Persian Gulf. It was the largest American military deployment since Vietnam. But unlike Vietnam, the immediate objectives of Desert Shield were abundantly clear to the men and women serving in it.   

Back in Washington, President Bush was speaking in soaring, high-minded rhetoric, but most American soldiers had no illusions about why they had been deployed to a lifeless desert halfway across the world. As Anthony Swofford cynically explained:

Our mission is to protect, to shield, Saudi Arabia and her flowing oil fields. We’ll be shielding enough oil to drive hundreds of millions of cars for hundreds of millions of miles, at a relatively minor cost to the American consumer. We joke about having transferred from the Marine Corps to the Oil Corps, or the Petrol Battalion, and while we laugh at our jokes and we all think we’re damn funny jarheads; we know we might soon die, and this is not funny,

We are being deployed to protect oil reserves and the rights and profits of certain American companies, many of which have direct ties to the White House and oblique financial entanglements with the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, and the commander in chief, George Bush, and the commander’s progeny. We know this because Kuehn, one of our representatives from Texas, says, “All those old white fuckers from Texas have their fat hands in Arab oil. The motherfuckers drink it like it’s beer.”

As thousands of well-armed, well-trained American soldiers marched off the tarmacs in Riyadh every hour on the hour, one could not help but marvel at the radical transformation the US military had undergone over the last 15 years. This was not the same Army that had fled Saigon in disgrace and disarray. The US military in 1990 was almost unrecognizable from the slapdash clusterfuck that had limped out of the Vietnamese jungle. As military historians James Dunnigan and Raymond Macedonia write:

“The military that went into the Gulf was prepared not by accident but by tremendous effort in the preceding twenty years. The American taxpayers got their money’s worth, and a lot of American soldiers owe their lives to these two decades of effort.”

When the Vietnam War came to a close, the US military was in very, very bad shape. It was, according to its critics, a “Hollow Army”, an empty shell of squandered potential and systemic incompetence. As Dunnigan and Macedonia describe:

“By the mid-1970s, the US Army was not a pleasant place to be … Drug use, racial animosities, low-quality troops, and inexperienced NCOS resulted in a crime wave in Army bases. Officers, and anyone else handy, were mugged by their own troops. Some were even murdered. Theft, brawling, and insubordination were rampant. Officers in many units were reluctant to enter barracks alone, or without a pistol on their hip.”

“Vietnam had created a loss of confidence in the military as a winning force as well as a loss of confidence in the professionalism of the military.”

But as they say, sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you can turn a corner. And starting in the late 1970s, that is exactly what the US military did. Turbocharged by a huge influx of spending courtesy of the Carter and Reagan administrations – about 3 trillion dollars in all - the armed forces reinvented themselves along almost every significant vector. Entire books have been written about the ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ of this process, but it essentially boiled down to a very simple philosophy:

People in the military should *want* to be in the military. And they should be well-trained, well-paid, and well-armed.

During the Vietnam War, the US had famously relied on the draft, or conscription, to fill the ranks of its Army. That meant there were tons of kids who were dragged, literally, into boot camp to serve in an organization that they did not believe in, for a cause they did not understand. And these “ill-trained citizen soldiers”, as one historian put it, died by the thousands in Vietnam.

But during the 1980s – everything changed. The US military transitioned to an all-volunteer fighting force. That meant: If you were in uniform, you had specifically chosen to be in uniform. These volunteers were given decent paychecks, world-class weaponry, and trained to a razor’s edge. As the saying went, “The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.”

And so, in less than 20 years, the US military transformed itself from a political punchline into the deadliest fighting force in human history. As Dunnigan and Macedonia describe: “The contrast between the American army of August 1973 and the American army of August 1990 was mind-boggling.”

But as guys like Anthony Swofford and Buck Wyndham touched down in Riyadh, the true battlefield efficacy of these reforms was still entirely theoretical. No one knew what Saddam Hussein was going to do, but whatever happened in the Persian Gulf was going to be a major test of the American military’s reforms. For an entire generation of commanders haunted and traumatized by the failures of Vietnam, it was a golden opportunity for redemption, a chance to restore the honor and reputation of their organization. But it also held the potential for another humiliating performance. If push came to shove, this was going to be a “final exam for the reformed army”, as one writer put it.

“The jungle ghosts of the past would be exorcised in the vast open deserts of the Middle East.” wrote historian Alistair Finlan.

But for now, the US military’s job was simply to hurry up and wait. To arm up, sit tight, and watch the Saudi border like a hawk. A confrontation with Iraq was coming, but what form it would take – and when – that was still unclear.

Across the Saudi border, past the tanks and trenches and barbed wire, beyond the desert and highways stretching all the way back to the Iraqi capital of Bagdad, Saddam Hussein was beginning to feel an old, unpleasant sensation. That twinge in his stomach that had kept him alive for 30 years. The feeling of fear.

Things were not going according to plan. No sooner had he taken Kuwait, than it had turned to ash in his palms. The Americans, those “conspiring bastards”, had been very, very busy. Before the victory champagne even went flat, Saddam began receiving one piece of bad news after another. The day of the invasion, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution condemning Iraq and calling for its withdrawal from Kuwait. That, Saddam had expected. Empty theatre was a United Nations specialty.

But what happened next was much more concerning. On August 6^th, while Dick Cheney was meeting with King Fahd in Riyadh, the UN passed a resolution to impose economic sanctions on Iraq. A trade embargo was established, enforced by US battleships, to squeeze Iraq’s already suffocating economy. No one, was going to be buying oil with an Iraqi flag on it.

Worse still, the United States and other countries across the world had frozen Kuwaiti assets, that vast, multi-billion-dollar network of accounts and investments that Saddam had hoped to use refill his coffers. Hussein had stolen the treasure chest, but now he had no way to open it. He was locked out. Like a bank robber covered in blue dye and surrounded by angry cops.  

AUDIO: “I immediately regret this decision”

Saddam had hoped, even expected, that no one would really care about his invasion of Kuwait. As Jeffrey Engel writes: “The only thing the world loved about Kuwait was its oil.” Instead, the invasion had unified the entire world against him in display of international solidarity not seen since World War 2. As it turned out, the most fearsome weapon in the American arsenal wasn’t a tank or a ship or a bomb or a plane. It was a checkbook and telephone.

6,000 miles away, in Washington DC, George Bush had been calling every world leader he could get ahold of. As he told his diary: “I have been on the phone incessantly, and have written down a long collection of names.”Bush knew that if he was going to send a quarter million troops into the Middle East, he would need the support and cooperation of as many other nations as possible. This could not be another Lone Ranger misadventure like Vietnam. They needed an alliance, a coalition, an unprecedented symbol of international unity in the post-Cold War reality.

From his gilded palace in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein watched in horror as almost the entire world joined the alliance against him. It was, according to one historian, “the most elaborate political and military coalition since the Napoleonic Wars.” As historian Jon Meacham writes:

The president made clear that American warriors were touching down in a faraway kingdom with the support and sanction of a symphony of nations: In the end, thirty-five countries would join the Bush-led coalition by contributing militarily: Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Hungary, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Soviet Union and China were diplomatically supportive.”

It was incredible. Even the Soviet Union sided with the US on the issue of Kuwait. As Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker later recalled:

“I think the Cold War ended . . . when the foreign minister of the Soviet Union stood side by side with the American Secretary of State on August the 3rd in 1990 at an airport in Moscow and condemned the action of a Soviet client state Iraq in occupying Kuwait.”

But of course, not all these nations were joining the Coalition out of the kindness of their hearts, or the preservation of high-minded ideals. To add as many layers of legitimacy to their crusade as possible, the Americans were prepared to grease palms, scratch backs, and write a few fat checks if necessary. As it turns out, money not only talks, it is multilingual. As Said K. Aburish writes:

Altogether, the creation of the alliance was underwritten by the largest bribe in recorded history – probably in all history”

The Soviet Union received a generous financial package and $6 billion. Egypt was forgiven $10 billion in debt. Syria was paid $5 billion. Turkey got 2.5 billion and a boatload of weapons. The US even turned a blind eye to China’s abysmal human rights record to guarantee their cooperation. Any nation that did not stand with the alliance, on the other hand, was savagely punished. When Yemen refused to vote with the rest of United Nations against Iraq, Secretary of State James Baker told their representative that it was “the most expensive vote they would ever cast.”

As the bribes changed hands and the coalition hardened into a monolith, things were looking very, very bad for Saddam Hussein. As Ephraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi describe:

Saddam was trapped. For him the invasion of Kuwait was not a matter of personal whim or greed. It was a measure stemming from dire necessity, a desperate bid to gain the vital financial resources on which his political future hinged. It was essential for his survival and thus, to him, a justifiable act. Moreover, he had taken all the necessary precautions to reduce the attendant risks of this step to the barest minimum: he had warned the Kuwaitis time and again not to continue their “economic conspiracy against Iraq.” He had even sought, and in his view received, a “green light” from the United States for an action against Kuwait. Now, all of a sudden, his scheme turned sour. Instead of the simple, straightforward operation he believed he had mounted, he found himself facing a nightmare scenario. It was no longer a conflict between Iraq and Kuwait but, rather, a feud between Iraq and almost the entire international community.”

Saddam had invaded Kuwait to alleviate his economic problems. Instead, he made them infinitely worse, and turned the entire world against him in the process.

He thought he had played Ambassador April Glaspie like a fiddle back in July, twisting her toothless regurgitations into a veritable green light to invade. He was wrong. And ironically, it was Glaspie who got the last word on her controversial sitdown with Saddam:

“We foolishly did not realize Saddam was stupid.”

As he stewed behind his desk in a haze of cigar smoke, racking his brain about what do to, it occurred to Saddam that all was not lost. Not yet. If the Americans wanted to play hardball, if they wanted to turn the entire world against him, all for the sake of a few Gucci sheiks…well, he knew how to play hardball too. There were plenty of dead bodies in plenty of basements who could attest to that.

For all his disadvantages, Saddam had one last ace up his sleeve. Something that would melt their shiny new coalition like butter in the sun. The Americans had Operation Desert Shield. But Saddam had something even better – human shields.

He had hostages.

--- ---- MUSIC BREAK ----- -----

It’s August 24^th, 1990.

We’re in Baghdad, the capitol of Iraq.

Across the Middle East, the mood is tense. With thousands of American troops assembling on the Saudi border, the entire region rests on a hair trigger. But in this small, clean room in Baghdad, things seem cheerful, relaxed, even festive. There are colorful balloons in the air, a cake on the table, and a group of small children playing and giggling. In the midst of one of the greatest diplomatic crises of the 20^th century…we’re at a little kid’s birthday party.

The guests of this birthday party are primarily British nationals, professionals and foreign contractors who had been working inside Kuwait before Saddam’s invasion. But now, they are prisoners. Hostages kept by the Iraqi government.

Like the unlucky passengers of British Airways Flight 149, which touched down in Kuwait just hours after the invasion, thousands of these foreign nationals found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, trapped in a warzone and hunted by the Iraqi Army. Americans, British, French, Germans, Malaysians, Japanese - a veritable United Nations of people who have no way out of Iraq. No way of getting home.

Some of these nationals were able to evade capture, cowering in abandoned apartments or sheltering with sympathetic Kuwaitis, but the vast majority have been scooped up and taken back to Iraq to serve as human shields. An insurance policy against any hostility from George Bush’s rapidly expanding Coalition.

And as they cut the cake and light the candles, the parents of the children at this Baghdad birthday party are painfully aware that this little façade of frivolity is paper thin. On Iraqi state media, they are euphemistically referred to as “foreign guests”, but with their passports confiscated and their movement restricted, they are captives, through and through. After all, how many birthday parties are attended by armed guards and ringed by television cameras?

The parents know that this birthday party is just a PR stunt, a shallow pantomime for the cameras, but they do their best to keep their kids calm and relaxed. Everyone is terrified, but if they can give their children the briefest moment of normalcy, well that’d be worth it. But a few moments later, that normalcy is shattered by the arrival of one last party guest. He is wearing a sharp, grey suit. His hair is coiffed and camera-ready; his mustache has been combed to perfection.

Saddam Hussein has arrived to say hello to the children.

The mood in the room instantly changes. The guards get nervous and jittery. The camera crews begin herding the children toward Saddam; and the parents glare at their host through fake smiles and clenched fists.

Like any dictator worth his salt, Saddam knows the value of a good PR stunt. He may be holding thousands of foreign nationals, entire families, against their will; but he wants to show the world that they are being well-treated. That he is not the monster George Bush and Margaret Thatcher and all the rest say he is. Would a monster throw a birthday party for one of his child captives? Unfortunately, Saddam’s propaganda instincts had all the sophistication of a sledgehammer, and as he mugged for the cameras with a gaggle of terrified kids, he failed to see the impression he was creating.

The most memorable and infamous moment of this goodwill visit happened when Saddam called a five-year-old boy named Stuart Lockwood over to his side. You can actually find footage of this, and the little boy looks absolutely terrified. He’s stiff as a board, not smiling, physically recoiling as Saddam literally pets his head. Stuart remembered years later as an adult:

I kind of knew who he was and that he was important – I’d seen pictures of him throughout the building. I didn’t exactly know how powerful he was, partly because my mum and dad had shielded me from it all.

Through his interpreter he started asking me stupid questions like, “Did you have milk with your breakfast?” Then he tried to sit me on his lap. I crossed my arms and shied away. Any five-year-old backs off when a stranger tries to sit them on their lap; I don’t think it was just because it was Saddam Hussein.

Needless to say, Saddam’s propaganda stunt was not the slam dunk he thought it would be with international audiences. The entire thing just came off as extremely creepy and sinister, and it only served to highlight the fact that Saddam was holding kids as hostages to deter any military action from Bush’s coalition. The whole Stuart Lockwood affair, writes Said K. Aburish, was a “prime example of his stupid policies and misjudgment of Western feelings.”

But for anyone paying attention, this was classic Saddam. This was just how the Iraqi dictator had always done business. Impulsive, unsentimental, improvisational. As Karsh and Rautsi explain:

“Saddam's decision to use the foreign hostages as a bargaining chip afforded yet another vivid illustration of his stark worldview. One's own survival justified all and any means. There was no room for legalistic or moral niceties. Mindful of Western sensitivity to human life, he was determined to exploit this Achilles’ heel to the full.”

Saddam’s calculus was clear. By keeping thousands of foreign hostages in Iraq, he was gambling that the Coalition’s resolve to remove his army from Kuwait would soften and break over time. That the world’s attention would shift to a long, drawn-out hostage crisis – not the annexation of a sovereign state and the theft of a vast percentage of the world’s oil supplies. As per usual, Saddam’s math was a bit off.

Back in Washington, President George Bush captured the feelings of many in a diary entry: “Blatant hostage holding. Another blatant disregard of international law by a cruel and ruthless dictator.[…] I can’t see how we can get out of it without punishing Iraq. What they are doing is unprincipled.”

The British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, expressed her opinion a bit more colorfully: “True Arab heroes do not hide behind the skirts of women and behind little children”

But not all of the hostages were being treated to birthday cakes and photo ops with Saddam Hussein. Across Iraq and Kuwait, hundreds of people were going through the most traumatizing ordeal of their lives.

In the days following the invasion, Saddam’s army swept through Kuwait, gathering up as many Western nationals as they could, with a particular focus on American and British citizens. The soldiers were ruthless in their search, as an American dentist named Robert Morris remembered:

“It was a cash reward for handing in Westerners. We were hearing that Kuwaitis who hid Westerners were strung up and castrated in front of their own families. Some Arabs offered refuge to foreigners and then suddenly turned them in to the police.”

Once captured, the hostages were stripped of their passports, loaded onto buses at gunpoint, and deposited in various camps and settlements across Iraq.  Along the way, they saw what had been done to Kuwait in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. According to a hostage named Fred Hart:

Almost every official Kuwait government building along the route had been shelled, torched, or destroyed. Wrecked and smoldering vehicles littered the highway, some with the charred remains present. The once well-manicured and green medians were now brown, dried up, and trashed.

Another hostage, an engineer named Jan Bhatt, recalled:

Buildings had been bombed to rubble, stores had been looted, and dead bodies and garbage were strewn all over the city, covered by swarms of flies. We noted no human activity other than the omnipresence of the soldiers and the tanks rolling by.

As “guests” of the Iraqi army, the hostages were placed in camps or run-down settlements

and mostly left to fend for themselves. But as they scavenged for food, rationed water, and carefully allocated resources, they were never far from an armed guard or the barrel of a gun. Naturally, this took a heavy emotional toll on the hostages, who had no idea when (or if) they would ever get to go home. As a woman named Daphne Halkyard recalled:

“Chronic fear became a way of life for us. Every day there was something on which we would focus. We were afraid of being bombed by the allies. We were afraid of illness. We were afraid of being lynched. We were afraid of the breakdown of some of our fellow hostages. We were afraid of letting something slip that could have jeopardized members of our little group. We were watching our backs the whole time. But there was nothing we could do, nothing we could do. Our lives were on the line. We had no illusions whatsoever about that.”

Another hostage named Jan Bhatt, who had been a passenger on British Airways Flight 149, remembered:

I rarely slept for more than a couple of hours at a time owing to the difficult conditions and impending sense of doom that were forever occupying my mind. I existed in a state of constant fear and extreme anxiety, as the idea that US hostages might be killed on international television in a theatrical warning to the United States continuously plagued me. I also understood from the beginning of my detention as a human shield that, owing to the nature of the locations at which I was detained, I would be among the first to die in the event of an allied aerial bombardment. I tried hard to remain in a positive frame of mind, but the longer I was detained, and the more physical hardships I endured, the more hope I lost and the more depressed I grew. The brutal and unexpected manner in which I had been seized from my British Airways flight contributed greatly to my extreme disorientation in the initial phases of captivity. One moment, I had had a good life—I was financially secure and on my way to India for a family vacation, and the next I was in captivity, attempting to reconcile myself to the fact that I might never see my family again.

Eventually a sense of despair and fatalism settled in for many of the hostages. A man named Paul Eliopoulos recalled years later:

“We were resigned to our fate. I mean, we were convinced we were going to be killed. We just hoped it would be done in a dignified way… my greatest fear was that they were going to hurt us before they killed us. We just wished we would go out fast.”

Most hostages managed to escape any serious mistreatment, but for some, like a British Airways steward named Charles Kristiansson, their worst fears became reality. As Charles recalled:

I was raped by an [Iraqi] officer familiarly called “Al Alemani”. He was an officer older than me but I’m not quite sure by how many years. He came to visit me several times…“I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to get shot, sometimes I felt I just wanted to go outside and run and get it over with.”

And Charles wasn’t the only hostage left with psychological wounds. During his captivity, a ten-year-old boy named Colin Blears saw something deeply upsetting. Something that lodged a splinter into his young mind. As he was being driven around Kuwait City, Colin caught sight of several bodies dangling from a crane. Dead Kuwaitis, strung up by Iraqi soldiers and swaying in the hot breeze. Something about the way the men were hanging drove Colin – again, just a ten-year-old kid – to try and take his own life. As journalist Stephen Davis describes:

One day Colin was in their room when he suddenly cried out, ran out to the balcony, and began to climb over the rails. He was grabbed before he could jump to what would have been certain death, but he remained depressed and withdrawn for a long time afterward.”

For other hostages, the worst part of the captivity was the uncertainty and tedium of it all. The complete lack of information or context or information. According to a man named Paul Dieppe:

Most of it was just crashingly boring, because there’s nothing to do. You’re in limbo, you’re kind of cut off from life. And although we had some contact, a little bit with the outside world through radio or whatever, we actually knew nothing about anything that was going on around us.

By the end of August of 1990, Saddam Hussein realized that keeping these hostages was only intensifying the world’s anger against him - only confirming what was being said in nightly newsrooms from Houston to Helsinki.

So, as a gesture of goodwill, he decided to release the women and children from Iraqi custody. Stuart Lockwood and Colin Blears and Daphne Halkyard and all the rest were going home. But the male hostages, anyone over the age of 16, they would have to stay. That meant wives leaving behind husbands, children leaving behind fathers, and mothers leaving behind sons. Families being split apart, possibly for good. A woman named Deborah Saloom remembered saying goodbye to her husband George:

I don’t think it is possible to prepare yourself for that kind of separation. We hugged a lot… When we walked through the gates and I saw my husband looking through the window blowing kisses at me I thought, Well then, this is it. I will never see him again.

Deborah struggled to express herself in a letter she left behind for George:

Dear George, I don’t know what to say—My heart is full! I love you with all my heart. I will do my best to care for Preston and Nathan and I’ll never rest until we’re all together again. I know you’ll be fine. I’ll work to get you out any way I can! My love and my heart are here with you. See you Home. My beautiful Ramblin’ Wreck (her pet name for him). Love Deb xxx

When it came to his dealings with the West, Saddam Hussein never met a diplomatic rake he could not step on, and in yet another tragicomic example of his strategic incompetence, this half-measure with the hostages only succeeded in deepening the world's resentment against him.

Back in Washington, Saddam’s cold-hearted bungling of the hostage situation served as red meat for the war hawks, who wanted to set aside the flaccid UN sanctions and use more tangible weapons to pry Iraq’s claws out of Kuwait. Not embargoes, not resolutions, real weapons. Bullets, bombs, missiles, and jets. The dogs of war were baying for blood, and the man holding the leash was starting to loosen his grip.

As a longtime advocate for American military might, President George H.W. Bush found himself right at home amongst the hawks; and before long, he was itching for a confrontation with the dictator he now regularly compared to Adolf Hitler. As the weeks and months dragged on, as the drip feed of horror stories leaked out of Kuwait, the crisis in the Persian Gulf began to take on a uniquely moral dimension for Bush. “His view of Saddam,” biographer Jon Meacham writes, “was now set in black and white.”

In the President’s mind, this was a historic confrontation, a crusade against what he called “the epitome of evil”. As Bush wrote in his diary: “I do think that World War II shaped my thinking on the Gulf. I have Saddam Hussein now as clearly bad and evil as Hitler and as the Japanese war machine that attacked Pearl Harbor. And I say, check him now, check him now.”

“My mind goes back to history,” Bush reflected, “How many lives would have been saved if appeasement had given way to force earlier on in the late ’30s or earliest ’40s? How many Jews might have been spared the gas chambers, or how many Polish patriots might be alive today? I look at today’s crisis as ‘good’ vs. ‘evil’—yes, it is that clear.”

This was Bush’s big moment, his page in the history books, his chance to prove to the world that he was still strong, that the Unites States was still strong. At this crucial juncture, America could not afford a “wimp” in the Oval Office. “I am determined,” Bush confided to his diary, “that I could not be a Jimmy Carter, an impotent, flicking US impotence in the eyes of the world.” As Jon Meacham described Bush’s mindset:

Saddam Hussein had challenged Bush’s universe, a post–Cold War world of order and balance, and the president of the United States was not interested in allowing a dictator to destroy a unique historical moment. Confront the aggression now, Bush thought, or else a world that had thought itself finally free of the threat of nuclear conflict could face a disastrous war in the Middle East—and wars of any size, Bush knew, could become bigger wars.”

But wars are like products. They have to be packaged, marketed, justified, and sold. Even a just war is never just war. Especially for a country still reeling from a national trauma like the Vietnam War. War means fighting and fighting means killing and killing means bodies. Just 15 years after the bungle in the jungle, was the American public really ready to go through all of that again? As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell said at the time: “The American people do not want their young dying for $1.50 gallon oil.”

And for that reason, the Bush administration was going to have to be very precise with their language. They were going to have to convince the American people that a war with Saddam Hussein would be a good war. A righteous war. As the 20-year-old Marine Anthony Swofford observed from his tent in the Saudi desert a few months later:

I’m a soldier, in a “conflict.” A “conflict” is much easier for the American public to swallow than a war. War still has that messy Vietnam feeling—the Vietnam War was not an official war either, but a perpetually escalating conflict with many poor, dead, sad fuckers. Conflicts—or even better yet, a series of operations—sound smaller and less complex and costly than wars.

But ironically, the best salesman for a hypothetical war against Iraq was none other than Saddam Hussein himself, who’d managed to make all the wrong moves and send all the wrong signals. He’d taken hostages, breached international norms, and most egregiously of all, he’d raised oil prices for the average American consumer. The unforgivable sin. It wasn’t long before public opinion in the US began to tilt towards a military confrontation with Iraq, a development that came as a pleasant surprise to the President. He told his diary:

“The hard-hats charge out from their trailers or from the building projects, the waiters, the people in the stores, and you hear, ‘Go for it, George.’ ‘Give ’em hell, George.’ From parking attendants, the airplane service people. It is strong support.” …But you know how I feel about polls, dear diary. I think they come and go, and we can be up and down. And, yes, I am pleased with the amount of support that I’m getting, but I know it can change fast.”

As support for a war against Saddam continued to grow, and Bush’s rhetoric continued to intensify, one extremely visceral news story entered the public consciousness.  

On October 10^th, about two-and-a-half months after Saddam’s invasion, a fifteen-year-old girl from Kuwait testified in front of a Congressional committee. In her tearful testimony, she described war crimes that she had personally witnessed in her home country.

Identified only by her first name, “Nayirah”, this young girl went on to recount atrocities committed by the Iraqi army. She claimed that Iraqi soldiers, while looting a Kuwaiti hospital, had removed premature babies from their incubators and left them to die on the hospital tile. And here is audio of that testimony:

AUDIO:

The second week after invasion, I volunteered at the AlIdar (phonetic rendering) Hospital with 12 other women who wanted to help as well. I was the youngest volunteer. The "other" women were from 20 to 30 years old.

While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying. I could not help but think of my nephew who was born premature and might have died that day as well. After I left the hospital, some of my friends and I distributed flyers condemning the Iraqi invasion until we were warned we might be killed if the Iraqis saw us. The Iraqis have destroyed everything in Kuwait. [FADE OUT]

For anyone with two ears and a conscience, that testimony is undeniably effective. And unsurprisingly, Nayirah’s story caught fire in the American media ecosystem, blazing to life as a perfect, horrifying example of just how bad Saddam and his soldiers were.

For President Bush, the Nariyah testimony was a gift from PR heaven. It was simple, it was human, it was something that every American in every living room across the country could understand. In the coming weeks, Bush went on to cite Nayirah’s testimony more than half a dozen times in speeches across the country.

There was just one problem, however.

Nayirah, and her testimony, were a lie. A complete falsification. As one academic summarized in a 2017 piece for American Quarterly:

Only after the war did Americans learn that Nayirah’s testimony was fabricated. Ten months after the ceasefire, the journalist John MacArthur revealed in a New York Times editorial that Nayirah was not your average Kuwaiti teenager. She was the daughter of the country’s ambassador to the United States, Saud Nasir al-Sabah, who had been sitting four seats down from her, unacknowledged, at the caucus hearing. Nayirah never volunteered at the al-Addan hospital. She had visited only once and, during that visit, had not witnessed babies being taken from incubators by looting soldiers, because such an incident had never occurred. The incubator story was a myth that had been circulating among Kuwaitis in Britain and the United States since the late summer and treated as fact by the Daily Telegraph (London) and the Los Angeles Times. Nayirah’s decision to assume the story as her own was a result of coaching by the public-relations firm Hill and Knowlton for its client Citizens for a Free Kuwait (CFK), a US-based organization bankrolled by the Kuwaiti government to advocate for the United States to militarily intervene on behalf of Kuwait.”

Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army were, of course, guilty of very real atrocities and very real breaches of international law. But ironically, it was a fabricated story that ultimately crystallized the issue for the American public and tipped the scales toward war. To borrow an old saying, “A lie can run round the world before the truth even has its boots on.”

It would be a full year and a half before anyone knew the truth about the Nayirah testimony, but in the final months of 1990, it achieved the exact effect its orchestators had intended.

AUDIO: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5072907/user-clip-res-678

The result of the voting is as follows. 12 votes in favor. 2 votes against. 1 abstention. The draft resolution has been adopted as Resolution 678, 1990.”

On November 29^th, 1990, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 678, authorizing the use of “all means necessary” to eject Iraq from Kuwait. Furthermore, it gave Saddam Hussein a final ultimatum - a deadline: Pull your troops out of Kuwait by January 15^th, 1991, or this Coalition will pull them out for you.

Real military intervention was now officially on the table. And no one expected Saddam Hussein to run back to Baghdad with his tail tucked between his legs. In all likelihood, the Coalition was going to war.

In Saudi Arabia, the American soldiers serving in Operation Desert Shield were beginning to feel a change in the air. As Lance Corporal Anthony Swofford commented at the time: “If I were apocalyptically inclined, I might well think that the end is nigh.”

But when you’re about to go to war, you need a war plan. Thankfully, the American military brass had already been working on one, for months. Operation Desert Shield was about to become Operation Desert Storm.

----- MUSIC BREAK ---

AUDIO: :015-1:29

Good evening. Once again, it’s that festive season. Tonight, our Jewish friends celebrate the fifth night of Hanukah, the celebration of a military victory won centuries ago in a part of the world that today, 400,000 brave Americans await my order to annihilate Iraq. None of us want war in that whole area out over there, but as commander in chief I am ever cognizant of my authority to launch a full-scale of orgy of death out there in the desert sands. Probably won’t, but then again…I MIGHT. Now if we go to war, I can assure you it will not be another Vietnam, because we have learned well the simple lesson of Vietnam: Stay out of Vietnam.”

That’s comedian Dana Carvey doing his famous George H.W. Bush impression during a December 15^th, 1990 episode of Saturday Night Live. Just one month before the final deadline for Iraq to pull its troops out of Kuwait.

Sometimes comedy can be the most transparent, and telling, window into a country’s feelings about a particular issue or problem. And in that cold open, you can hear all the conflicting emotions that Americans had about the impending showdown with Saddam Hussein. The dorky countenance of the commander-and-in-chief, juxtaposed against the frightening power he could unleash. The general unfamiliarity people had with Kuwait - a vague “over there” place that most Americans couldn’t find on a map. And then of course the lingering ghosts of Vietnam; that pervasive feeling of ‘please, please, let’s not do that again”.

While the cameras were rolling on Dana Carvey in New York City, 6,500 miles away in Saudi Arabia, the finishing touches were being put on America’s war plan to dislodge the Iraqi Army from Kuwait. The plan to defend Saudi Arabia from any potential attack had been dubbed Desert Shield, but the offensive plan would need a slightly more theatrical, and threatening, moniker.

Operation Desert Storm was almost a-go.

It would become, Jon Meacham writes, “the largest and most complex American military operation in a generation”. Half a million men. 130,00 tanks and vehicles. 519,000 tons of ammunition and supplies. 2.5 billion gallons of fuel – all drawn back like a mailed fist and aimed squarely at the face of the Iraqi Army.

This was going to be a generation-defining operation. Something that could make or break America’s reputation on the global stage. George Bush may have been the nominal commander-in-chief of this shindig in the desert, but he knew that the actual execution of a hot war is best left to the experts.

President Lyndon. B Johnson had once bragged at the height of the Vietnam War that American pilots “can’t even bomb an outhouse without my approval”. Bush, for all his faults, knew better than to micromanage a war from the Oval Office. The military men who’d spent the last fifteen years rebuilding the “Hollow Army” of Vietnam into the deadliest organization on the planet were not about to let the suits in Washington tell them how to fight. This was their chance for redemption, their one big shot at restoring faith in the American military.

But who exactly was going to be calling the shots? Who was going to be the ringleader of this rodeo? Well, that very important task fell on the broad, beefy shoulders of a four-star Army General named Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf, as the American media would soon christen him.

And for my money, “Stormin’ Norman” is without a doubt one of the most colorful characters in this story.

Picture – if you will - the biggest, meanest high-school football coach you’ve ever seen, and you’ll start to have a pretty good mental approximation of General Norman Schwarzkopf. In 1990, he is 56 years old. At six foot three inches, 240 pounds, he is like a mountain in any room he steps into. “A great slab of a man”, writes historian Rick Atkinson, “the very image of an American Mars”

But Schwarzkopf was no lumbering grunt.

He could crack a joke and work a crowd; he could tangle with journalists, diplomats, and politicians with the precision and grace of a laser-guided bomb. He may have looked like a bouncer at a dive bar, but he was in possession of a “formidable intellect and an adhesive memory”, according to one historian.

And in the fall of 1990, that formidable intellect was unleashed on the problem of Saddam Hussein, Kuwait, and the Iraqi Army. As the leader of Central Command – or CENTCOM – Schwarzkopf was in charge of all US military operations in the Middle East. He had direct oversight and command over any and all troops in the Persian Gulf - the Army, Marines, Air Force, and the Navy.

There were some, however, who had their doubts about Schwarzkopf, and whether he had the right temperament for such a delicate operation. Because “Stormin’ Norman’” had a bit of a dark side. A gentle giant, he was not.

Schwarzkopf was absolutely notorious for his temper. As historian Bernard Trainor writes: “Like the benign Dr. Jekyll, the normally charming and affable four-star general could become a tempestuous and nasty Mr. Hyde under the proper stimulus.”

This was a guy who, according to Rick Atkinson, was prone to “operatic rages” and “paroxysms of wrath”. One aide, writes Atkinson, “came to think of Schwarzkopf as a volcano – at times nearly dormant but for a small hiss of steam, at other times erupting with molten rage. His temper built progressively, the voice climbing to a bellow, the complexion flushing from pink to red to purple.” Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney once commented that Schwarzkopf was “something of a screamer”

This made Schwarzkopf a very polarizing figure within the chain of command. “Few in the army felt neutral about Schwarzkopf,” writes Bernard Trainor, “they either liked him or loathed him. To his admirers, Schwarzkopf was a warrior. To his detractors, and there were many, he was a bully, who commanded through intimidation and was too eager to grab the credit that belonged to others.” And Schwarzkopf was well aware of his reputation. Admitting that his tendency to blow up at his subordinated was “without question my major weakness as a commander.”

But for better or worse, “Stormin’ Norman” was the man chosen to crack Kuwait like an egg, destroy Saddam’s army, and liberate 20% of the world’s oil. There was no question about the “what” or “why” of Operation Desert Storm, but in the fall of 1990, the biggest question for Schwarzkopf and his Lieutenants was “How?”. This was not going to be easy.

The American troops, as well-trained as they were, experienced no small amount of apprehension as they prepared to face the Iraqi Army. As the Marine Anthony Swofford wrote in his book Jarhead:

We look north toward what we’re told is a menacing military, four hundred thousand or more war-torn and war-savvy men. Some of the Iraqi soldiers who fought during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war (September 1980 to August 1988) began tasting combat when we were ten years old. The Iraqi dead totaled more than 120,000, with 300,000 or more wounded and 60,000 prisoners of war. An army capable of sustaining such damage and invading another neighbor two years later sounds like a truly menacing force. And the civilian population that supports this army and its missions, that accepts such a staggering mutilation and loss of fathers and sons, must be extremely devoted to the country and the protection of its leader. While fighting Iran, the Iraqis became experts at fortifying their border using mines and obstacles, such as the thirty-kilometer-long and eighteen-hundred-meter-wide artificial lake used to defend the city of Basra. We’re forced to wonder what the Iraqis are preparing for us at the Saudi-Kuwaiti border.

Swofford was right. Since August, the Iraqi Army had been very busy. Saddam Hussein had turned Kuwait into a fortress. Satellite images of the country showed layer-after-layer of infantry-shredding defenses. Minefields, tank traps, and huge ribbons of razor wire scattered all across the desert. Beyond that were mortar, machine gun, and artillery installations. Beyond that, tanks, fighter jets, and APCs. To deter an amphibious assault into Kuwait Bay, the Iraqis had even rigged oil tankers to explode and create “a sea of fire”, according to one historian.

The most feared weapon in Iraq’s arsenal, however, was their stockpile of chemical weapons. Since his takeover in 1979, Saddam Hussein had been steadily producing mustard gas and Sarin nerve agents to deploy against his enemies. The first unfortunate souls to get a taste of that medicine were Iranian soldiers during Iraq’s war against the Ayatollah in the 1980s. In a conflict already infamous for its high casualties and pointless butchery, the use of chemical agents added a terrifying new layer to the experience. As the writer Con Coughlin put it:

Nerve gas the advantage of being odorless and colorless. It is easy to make and easy to spread, and it makes killing easy and efficient.

By 1987, Saddam was comfortable using chemical weapons to put down dissent within the borders of his own country, as well. When the Kurds, an ethnic group in western Iraq, took advantage of the war with Iran to rise up in a bid for independence, Saddam flooded their villages with huge clouds of nerve gas. In the village of Halabja, five thousand people – men, women and children – were killed in a single day.  

Needless to say, the US military’s task was going to be a daunting one. As an A-10 pilot named Buck Wyndham commented: “I’m awfully glad not to be a US Army soldier, facing the prospect of slogging through the sand and smoke, trying to cross a 10-foot deep pit of flaming crude oil, while Iraqis shoot at you from the other side. I’ll take my big, empty sky anytime.

To make matters worse, the casualty estimates coming out of the Pentagon were discouraging to say the least. A study by a D.C. think-tank called the Center for Defense Information predicted that 10,000 American troops would be killed and 35,000 injured in a war that lasted four months. “The worst-case scenario,” wrote one historian, “visualized 30,000 military personnel dying in 20 days.”

And that potential for high casualties was the crux of Saddam’s entire defensive strategy. As one historian described: “The Iraqi commanders intended to fight the same kind of war they waged against Iran, a grinding battle of attrition with high casualties on both sides that would nullify the American hopes to win a quick victory with high-technology weapons.”

But as Norman Schwarzkopf and his lieutenants ruminated on this problem, a plan began to take shape. A strategy that, if successful, would nullify all of Iraq’s advantages and keep American casualties to a bare minimum. And it all started as a crude drawing on a chalkboard somewhere in the bowels of CENTCOM HQ.

At first glance, this drawing looked like a dartboard or a target. It was just five rings, five concentric circles, traced in thin white chalk. But despite its simplicity, the “Five Rings” plan, as it was known in its infancy, represented a huge shift in conventional strategic thinking. Normally, when you fight a war, you prioritize going straight at the enemy army. You fight them, you starve them, you capture them, you kill them – end of story. 

But the Five Rings strategy called for a focus on what Army planners described as the “centers of gravity”. As Rick Atkinson explained: “The innermost circle stood for Iraqi leadership. The next circle – the second most critical center of gravity, represented petroleum and electricity targets, without which a modern military was crippled. Third was Iraqi infrastructure, particularly transportation. Fourth was the Iraqi population. The fifth and outermost circle symbolized Saddam’s fielded military force.”

In other words, if we destroy the Iraqi army’s ability to communicate with itself, the technological and strategic infrastructure is depends on to wage war...it won’t matter how well-armed or well-prepared they are. Their capability to fight will simply collapse.

An Air Force Colonel named David Deptula put it more viscerally: “Imagine Iraq like a human body. What happens if you take away somebody’s ability to think, somebody’s ability to communicate with the rest of the body? What happens if you sever their spinal cord. They can’t function, right?” One Air Force commander described the strategy a bit more bluntly: “It’s a hit-them-in-the-face plan.”

What this all meant, was that not only would the Iraqi army be a target, but Iraqi cities and towns and population centers. Dams and bridges and factories. Water supplies and electrical grids. As an Air Force commander named Michael Dugan put it:

This wouldn’t be a Vietnam-style operation, nibbling around the edges. The way to hurt you is at home, it’s not out in the woods somewhere.”

But as the preparations for Operation Desert Storm continued in Schwarzkopf’s bunker in Riyadh, fierce debates were being taking place back home in America. Many U.S. politicians and representatives were hesitant to support a war in which thousands upon thousands of Americans might die. And for what? Lower oil prices? The investment portfolios of a few Gucci sheiks? Why don’t we just let the sanctions take their toll, let Iraq’s economy wither and die, let the people rise up and depose Saddam Hussein for us? Why risk American lives at all?

“I see no compelling reason to rush to military action,” said Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, “Of course there are no guarantees on economic sanctions. There are also no guarantees on war.”

Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota agreed: “I could not accept the loss of life of any of our children in the Persin Gulf right now. And that tells me that in my gut, I do not believe that it’s time to go to war!”

Even old hawks from the Vietnam era like Robert MacNamara, who had orchestrated the disastrous and fruitless strategy in Southeast Asia, were seriously gun shy about Kuwait. Had we learned nothing?

“Surely, we should be prepared to extend the sanctions over a 12- or 18-month period. If that offers an opportunity to achieve our political objective without the loss of American lives, who can doubt that a year of blockade will be cheaper than a week of war? [….] The point is it's going to be bloody! There are going to be thousands and thousands and thousands of casualties!

All throughout December and the first week of January, U.S. representative debated. Point and rebuttal, argument and counter-argument. But on January 12th, the moment of truth finally arrived. The US Congress going to vote on whether America should go to war in the Persian Gulf. Just a mile-and-a-half down the street from Capitol Building, in the White Office, George H.W. Bush agonized over what was about to happen. But the more he thought about it, the more convinced he was of the necessity of Operation Desert Storm.

“Congress is in a turmoil,” he told his diary, “and I am more determined than ever to do what I have to do. If they are not going to bite the bullet, I am. They can file impeachment papers if they want to.”

“...I’m convinced that they’ll support us—the Congress—provided it’s fast and surgical. But if it’s drawn out and long, well then you’ll have all the hand wringers saying, ‘They shouldn’t have done it,’ and they’ll be after my neck.”

But at the end of the day, Bush was dead-set on moving ahead with Operation Desert Storm. History, he believed, would ultimately vindicate him: “If I don’t get the votes,” he told an aide “I’m going to do it anyway. And if I get impeached, so be it.”

AUDIO: “By recorded vote, the Yeas are 250, the Nays are 183 – the Joint resolution is adopted.”

With the Joint Resolution passed, George Bush had his own green light. Minutes later, a phone rang in Riyadh. Norman Schwarzkopf and Operation Desert Storm were cleared to move forward. In three days, the United Nations deadline would elapse, and if Saddam Hussein’s Army wasn’t out of Kuwait by midnight on January 15, the Coalition would attack.

If anyone actually thought Iraq would cave to the threat of war and leave Kuwait before the deadline, Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz made his nation’s intentions clear: “My youngest son is eleven years old. The experiences of his lifetime are exclusively confined to war, to expecting Iranian air raids and missiles. So, war is not something alien to us.”

[pause]

Well folks, that is it for today’s episode. Next time, in the third and final installment of this series, we’ll jump right into the action of Desert Storm. We’ll explore how the war was fought, how it was perceived at the time, and how it affected not only the soldiers in it, but the civilians caught in the crossfire.  

As always, thanks for your patience between episodes, and I hope you have an awesome day.

This has been Conflicted. I’ll see you next time.

AUDIO: (OUTRO)

You see the world’s behind us. Not like Vietnam. And this time our strike will be swift & deadly. Dangerous. Now I know you’re watching out there Mr Saddam Hussein. The time is running out on ya. The deadline, the morning of January 15^th….*whistles*

--- END ---